Blue In Green
by King of the Ashes
Summary: The Lone Wanderer talks to Charon about colors.


**AN/ **A very short story based on a kinkmeme prompt about Charon and a Blind Lone Wanderer, I've been trying to stop myself from writing huge fills that I'll never finish pfft.

She twined her fingers through his, restlessly moving her thumb back and forth over the uneven, necrotic skin at the back of his hand. Which she had once described as 'like the roots of an old tree', though he was pretty sure she didn't have much for comparison.

"Ok, red. What does red mean to you?" she asked, another question in a line of never ending questions he was obligated to answer.

"Nothing. It's a color." he answered simply.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I mean what do you see when red comes to mind?"

He thought about it a moment.

"Blood," he eventually said.

"Morbid. Accurate I guess. I think fighting is kind of...red. All around, you know?"

"I don't."

"I mean," She paused to huff a piece of hair out of her milky eyes, staring up into the nothingness of the metro ceiling above them, "When you fight, your heart starts pumping really fast, and everything feels red. If you get hit, you get angry. That feels red too. Then of course when you bleed, it's like your being drained of all the red feeling. If you lose too much, you black out and it all goes away."

"Red is nothing but a color," Charon repeated.

"Only because you can see the physical manifestation of it. The way an object reflects wavelengths you perceive as color. 'Red' isn't really anything. A dog might see yellow where we see red because of the different cones in its eyes, and if we turned off the way we register the wavelengths given by objects, who knows what the world would really look like. White maybe. It might not even be that."

"You think about color a lot."

"Yeah," she chuckled, and shifted to lay her head against his leg, "Really, I just like thinking about the meaning behind them rather than what they look like. You could never truly explain to me what red looks like, so it helps to have something to...I guess something to connect it to. Colors invoke such an emotional reaction in people though, it's easier for me 'get' what color is if I connect it to a feeling or situation."

"And combat is red."

"Yup." She shifted a little to face him, though her eyes still had yet to focus on him. "It's not just emotions though, people are colors too."

At that he had to arch a brow.

"How does that work?"

"There's rarely ever a method to my madness," she chuckled and shrugged, "Sometimes I just associate colors to people. Like ehm...Oh, like Moriarty. He's gold."

"That is...a very nice thing to say about him."

"I know, I know. Way too good for him. But there's a reason, trust me. See, gold is this big loud color, it's shiny, people tend to think of money and prosperity at the mention of it. Thing about gold is, it's really hard, but also really brittle. Gold has no uses, it's just pretty. Draws people in. Meanwhile, metals far less valuable than gold are far more reliable."

"An odd way of thinking."

She shrugged.

"At the end of the day, I still don't know what gold really looks like." She laid against him for awhile in silence, fingers continuing to restlessly move between his. "...You're blue."

"Why is that?" This he had to hear.

"Well, I had trouble putting a color to you. I asked Nova the last time we were in Megaton what she thought you'd be. Gob said gray. I said that wouldn't work. I said that you were calm, almost meditative, and that you followed loyally wherever the road lead. Like a river. Nova said that'd obviously make you blue." She tipped her head a little, a smile lighting her pale features. "Do you think that works?"

Charon had honestly never thought about it. Of course, no one thought about something as simple as color as much as 101 had. It was an odd thing to consider. If he were to pick, or one of his employers like Ahzrukhal, then Gob's choice of gray might have worked. But blue had a certain life to it. A color he never would have picked, but oddly, he felt somewhat comfortable with the comparison. He nodded.

"Blue," he parroted, "Alright then."

A pause hung between them.

"I like blue," she said after a moment, lips quirked in a smirk.

"You don't know what blue looks like."

"I know what it feels like."


End file.
